Adrian Lewis got darts nickname after almost being arrested in Las Vegas casino
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Two-time world champion Adrian Lewis has one of the most recognisable nicknames in darts.
Lewis has had the ‘Jackpot’ moniker ever since he burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s. But the nickname doesn’t stem from an interest in gambling, but a scary incident related to it.
It occurred in the mecca for gambling as the so-called Sin City hosted the Las Vegas Desert Classic in the mid-2000s. Lewis, now 37, was a fresh-faced 20-year-old who was starting to make his mark in the sport having been taken under the wing of the great Phil Taylor.
It was there where he had a worrying brush with the law after getting on the wrong side of staff at a casino following a big win, of $72,000 to be precise. “I was with a bloke called Steven Burden, who used to play on the circuit, an Irish fella,” Lewis explained in the latest Darts Show Podcast Special.
“He was playing on the machines. It was five o’clock and we were about to get ready to go out for the evening. I thought while he was on that, I’d put a couple of hundred dollars in a machine. It was five or 10 dollars a spin. Anyway, the screen froze, the light starts flashing and the cashier said ‘you won big jackpot’.”
However, there was one rather large problem. Lewis was still a few months short of being 21, the legal age for gambling in the States.
“At that point, I’m looking round saying ‘me?’ Obviously I knew I wasn’t 21 so I said to him [Burden] ‘come here’. The cashier has come over. They’ve had his passport [to check his age] and everything. At this point, I was near the elevators because I wanted to stay out of the way. Then there was more security, they pointed at me and obviously asked for my passport. Then they threatened my mum and everything with arrest.”
Lewis managed to talk his way out of the situation, but only after being warned the whole tournament would be cancelled if he was caught drinking alcohol or gambling on the premises again.
“They [the casino] kept the money and no one got arrested," he said. "But they did say to Tommy Cox, the tournament director, ‘we know he’s here with the darts, if we see him having a drink around the venue, we’re going to cancel the darts tournament’. I didn’t dwell on it, I just cracked on.”
